Interactive 3D exploration for a touch-first kiosk
SAU Missions Dashboard
Built for Southern Adventist University's large-format touchscreen kiosk, this interactive dashboard connects global mission locations with the students serving there. A custom 3D globe, personal stories, and service-opportunity showcases invite visitors to explore the university's worldwide mission presence and discover ways to get involved.
View Demo
An invitation to explore and serve
- Explore a connected world
- Spin the globe and discover where students are making a difference. Tap glowing candle markers to meet missionaries or select a country for local stories and mission statistics. Nearby markers group together as you explore, keeping even busy regions easy to navigate.
- Meet the people behind the missions
- Put faces to places with photo-led student and team directories, country filters, and profiles full of personal stories. As the globe turns, smart spotlights introduce students coming into view, giving visitors time to read before moving on to someone new.
- A distinctive space environment
- Reflective oceans, softly lit clouds, and sweeping auroras make the globe feel alive. Custom shaders create the detail, while drifting nebulae, layered stars, and the occasional shooting star turn the surrounding space into part of the experience.
- From discovery to participation
- Help visitors find their next step through swipeable opportunity showcases, inviting photography, and details they can open at their own pace. A quick QR scan takes opportunity or appointment links straight to their phone, so exploring can lead to action beyond the kiosk.
- Content staff can keep current
- Keep the dashboard fresh without a new app release. Staff use Strapi to update student profiles, opportunities, photos, page text, and kiosk settings. Mission updates become presentations visitors can tap through or let play automatically.
- Built for an unattended kiosk
- Ready for the next visitor, without someone standing by. After inactivity, the dashboard clears selections and resets the globe; during use, automatic motion pauses where needed. The Tauri desktop app supports signature-verified updates and nightly refreshes that wait until visitors are finished.
Behind the experience
Engineered for the public display
A shared touchscreen needs more than compelling visuals. It needs to stay accessible, responsive, and reliable long after the first visitor.
- InteractionMade for a tap, not just a click
- Generous touch targets and high-contrast profiles make exploring feel natural on a wall-sized screen. A forest-green, ivory, and brass palette gives the dashboard its character, while keyboard navigation, clear focus indicators, and reduced-motion options help more visitors enjoy it.
- ReliabilityKeep the stories flowing
- A failed request shouldn't end a visitor's journey. The dashboard checks incoming API data, retries temporary failures, and keeps previously loaded content available when updates fail. Staff can see what's out of date or needs attention and refresh affected sections without restarting the whole experience.
- PerformanceRich detail, less heavy lifting
- The globe pairs detailed 4K/8K textures with custom shaders for a vivid view of the world. Behind the scenes, lazy loading, shared map calculations, and targeted React updates cut unnecessary work, so the application can spend more of its effort on what visitors actually see.
- EfficiencyBuilt for the long run
- The globe takes a break when it isn't on screen, pausing rendering and marker-position updates rather than working out of sight. As visitors move between views, the app clears unused timers, event subscriptions, and graphics resources to keep long kiosk sessions running efficiently.
Technology stack
- Interface
Touch-friendly screens, swipeable showcases, and fluid animation bring student stories within reach.
- React
- TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS
- Swiper
- React Spring
- Graphics
A custom 3D world combines real geographic data with shader-driven oceans, atmosphere, and space effects.
- Three.js
- react-globe.gl
- GLSL shaders
- GeoJSON
- Content & desktop
Staff manage live content through Strapi, while Tauri packages the dashboard as a desktop app with verified updates.
- Strapi API
- Tauri
- Development & testing
Fast development tools, automated tests, and repeatable map-texture generation support ongoing improvements.
- Vite
- Bun
- Vitest
- Map-texture generation scripts